Sunday, May 11, 2008

Club Penguin

Finishing up the GamesIndustry.bizweek of special content around the massively multiplayer online genreis a look at a title that's not often considered as part of the MMOstable at all - although that's not likely to bother the founders ofClub Penguin, an online social play experience for children that wasacquired by Disney in August last year.

Here, co-founder and general manager of the titletalks in-depth about the challenges and rewards of putting togethersomething for a wholly different audience, and how trust is the brandis of paramount importance.

Q: You'vedone a great job of connecting to audiences not really catered for inthe usual suspect MMOs - are the parents understanding what it isyou're trying to do?

Lane Merrifield:Yeah, because it's so different, even the concept of virtual worldsdidn't exist when we first started talking to the press about this, sothey would ask if it was an MMO like World of Warcraft - and we'd tellthem that it wasn't really, that it's far simpler, it's not aboutlevelling up, it's much more of a social game.

And then people would compare it toFacebook or MySpace, and again, we'd tell them that it wasn't like that- in the exact antithesis of those we encourage kids to not reveal anysort of personal identifiable information. And we have huge filters andover 100 moderators to try and keep the world as safe as possible.

So we'd always use the example of avirtual playground, like a sandbox - taking lots of fun elements,putting them together, and watching how the kids use them. And thenlearning from that, and creating more elements that are attuned tothat.

For example, there's a coffee shop, andoften you'll come in and see somebody posing as the coffee shopmanager, or find people walking around and serving each other coffee,and it's no different to a play set in school.

Q: How did people respond to that message? Has it been easier over time?

Lane Merrifield:Well, we didn't really have a marketing budget when we first started,but a lot of the media were finding out about it by watching their kidsplay it. And then they'd come and talk to us about it, so there was ageneral understanding of it, because of a relative who happened toplay, so we really haven't faced a lot of barriers.

I think one of the biggest challengesis the irresponsible nature with which our industry has taken care ofkids for a long time - so there's a great cynicism out there, andunderstandably so. I'm a parent myself, and part of why we created ClubPenguin was my own frustration with what was out there.

And even this over-reliance ontechnology...I mean, we're technologists, but we know its limits, andthere needs to be that human element - which is why over two thirds ofour staff are safety moderators, customer service, and so on.

We know the limits of technology, eventhough I would put our filtering software up against anybody's,especially because of that human element - we're adding 500 to 1000words every day to the filters, simply because of slang that works itsway into the language.

And every new pop song that comes outis inevitably going to reference something that was innocent the weekbefore, but isn't so much now.

Q: It's a kind of emergent play in a way - that must throw up a lot of problems?

Lane Merrifield:It's been refined a lot in the past two years, when you look at thenumber of players coming through, and we've still not had a singlereportable incident. For most of our peers it's pretty common to atleast have one or two issues.

We've had to work with authorities whenfor instance somebody has sent an email to customer support threateningto hurt themselves or something - those are issues that we'll deal withif they come up, and Disney has a great infrastructure to deal withthat sort of thing.

But there's nothing that's actuallyhappened in-game, because of how much we've learned, and the humanresources behind it. There's a lot of human intervention, and if thereare any gaps, they are spotted pretty quickly and dealt with before itcan become an issue.

Q: Have you been surprised by Club Penguin's success?

Lane Merrifield:Absolutely, I'd be silly if I said I wasn't. We built this for our kids- I mean we built it scalable, and part of why we didn't have any VCmoney, no investors, was because we didn't build it as a business - webuilt it as a side project.

Lance, another of the partners - hisoldest child and mine are about three months apart, and we were talkingabout how they were learning to use the mouse, starting to use thecomputer and the internet.

And it was that dialogue, and sometechnologies that Lance had been working on that really was the birthof Club Penguin. So a lot of this has come as a surprise. We werehoping that a lot of parents would see the value in it, to subscribe inorder to keep it ad-free.

A lot of people accuse us of beinganti-ads - the ad model is a great model for most of the Internet, andit even is for older kids who understand the differences, but I foundthat my son would sometimes end up in shopping carts on websites,because at five years old he couldn't read it all to tell thedifference - and that really bothered me.

So we decided that for this youngdemographic, to keep it as pure and as clean from advertising aspossible, and we needed to fund it another way. People said we werenuts for trying to do it on subscription, but if we're nuts, we'renuts. We thought we'd try and build it on a shoe-string, and then builda scalable model.

We have a saying in our office that ifit doesn't matter to an eight year-old, it doesn't matter. And that'swhy we didn't spend a lot of time with the press, we didn't spend a lotof time at conferences or trying to build up awareness of the site -because we wanted to focus on the user experience.

And we thought if we did that, anddelivered what we said we were going to do, didn't overhype, then therest would take care of itself.

My hope is that it's shown a lot ofother companies out there that there's a desire for parents to havethat kind of experience, and a desire from kids who play the site andenjoy it that they're not shying away from safe environments - thatthey do long for that, but the also want a compelling social experienceas well. They don't want a single player experience all the time, theywant to connect - and there's nothing wrong with connecting with theirfriends in a moderated environment.

Q: What led to the decision to accept Disney's offer? What does it bring to the table?

Lane Merrifield:Well, we got to a point where we'd gone as far as our infrastructurecould take us - not that we couldn't continue to grow it out privatelyor independently, but being in a smaller city in Canada...and franklywe were getting to the point where the desire to spend three or fouryears building up the infrastructure versus getting into the creativeprocess was a difficult one.

We used the example of home-schooling achild - we'd brought it through elementary school and high school, andwe saw that it had the potential to go on and get its PhD, but weweren't fully equipped to get it there. So we had a choice.

A lot of people obviously focus on themoney, and obviously that's been a big part, an amazing part of it, butfor us...we've been offered money from VCs in the past, but it reallycame down to not needing the financial resources as much as thecreative resources.

We feel like kids in a candy shop nowbecause we're able to explore all these avenues now, with experts inthese fields, who are very willing to work alongside us while alsobeing careful to not trample us. From the top down they've been verycareful to let us continue doing our thing, and not squash us.

I've actually been very surprised,because I went into the process almost quite cynical about it, and it'sgone far better than I could have hoped.

Q: Are there any plans for cross-brand experiences with some of the other Disney properties?

Lane Merrifield:We're never going to do anything in-game - we'll never do anything inClub Penguin. So Mickey's never going to show up. The game willcontinue to stay pure, in the same way that a Pixar movie would. It'sthat kind of environment.

In terms of taking the brand offline, it's something that we've beenlistening to our fans about for a long time, and they've obviously beenwanting to experience it in other ways - and we're still in the initialstages of talking about that.

There are conversations happening withthe parks, but we're trying to tread very slowly and make sure we'resimply being responsive to the audience, and that we're never pushinganything on them. It's a delicate line - you don't want to ignore themon the one hand, but at the same time Disney is not treating this likea movie, they're not going to through a million products at this.

Q: No 'Club Penguin on Ice', then?

Lane Merrifield:[laughs] Actually...that's one of the few things that could work...butno, there's nothing in the pipeline, not even in the early stages ofplanning at this point. Disney sees this as a long term brand, and theywant to continue to explore it, but frankly they've seen the power ofletting the fans make the choices, and the hope is that we'll simply beable to extend that offline.

Lane Merrifield is theco-founder and general manager of Club Penguin and executive VP of theWalt Disney Internet Group. Interview by Phil Elliott.